SNYCU Episode 112 - December 11, 2019 - Light Version
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In this episode, we cover the worldwide rollout of BERT and the languages it now includes, the recent changes to Google's Quality Rater's Guidelines, more on the November 8th update, our recent robots.txt experiment, a disavow case study and some neat SEO tools and tips.
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In this episode:
- Algorithm Updates
- Quality updates can affect subdomains in individual ways
- BERT is now live in many more languages
- MHC Announcements
- Newsletter pause for the holidays
- Robots.txt experiment
- Google Announcements
- Package tracking early access program
- Google SERP Changes
- Check this out! Google is showing zero cost options in the SERPs
- SEO Tips
- Disavow case study
- This just in: create quality content
- Brodie Clark continuing to test thumbnail images on mobile
- JavaScript rendering -- from Martin Splitt at TechSEO Boost
- Are you asking users to login or create an account to see pricing?
- Episode 4 of Search for Beginners
- Other Interesting News
- How do you pronounce JSON?
- Global search stats from Google Search
- Update to Google Assistant based on your diet
- You might have noticed that your YouTube account lost a number of subscribers this week
- Local SEO - Google SERP Changes
- Google changed how the "Ad" label looks on Desktop for the local 3-pack
- ‘Rated highly for' review tags appear
- Local SEO - Other Interesting News
- GMB creating posts with uploaded images
- SEO Tools
- Internal linking tool to help you find links at scale
- Visualize your top internal pages with ScreamingFrog
- Recommended Reading
- Recommended Reading (Local SEO)
- Jobs
- Want More?
Paid members also get the following:
- Interesting note for those who were affected by the November 8 update
- BERT is also being used by Google to analyze page content
- The QRG have updated
- Part 2 of Google’s ‘Four Rs of Responsibility’ surrounding YouTube
- The real problem with your 404s
- Looking for an option to store old SERPs?
- Google is good at remembering things about URLs
- Pagination and the topic of crawl budget
- If a site has been switched to MFI, why does it still get crawled with Googlebot desktop?
- Invest in what you can control, all else should be secondary
- Deceptive page titles won't hurt you organically per se, but not matching on-page searcher intent will
- Does having more than one h1 on a page confuse Googlebot?
- Bias in search and recommender systems
- A breakdown of Martin Splitt’s talk from TechSEO Boost
- Which SEO myths need to be buried?
- A new resource for tracking browser protection features
- My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles
Algorithm Updates
While there have not been any obvious and significant Google updates over the last week or two, we do have a number of clients seeing changes in their traffic patterns on November 24-25 and also between December 3-5. However, many of these changes could be explained by seasonality. While it is possible that there was a tweak to Google’s quality algorithms at this time, we think these are either seasonal changes, or just normal ranking fluctuations.
There was a bit of chatter about local ranking changes happening December 3-5, but at this point we don’t know whether this is due to “Bedlam”, the November Local Search update, or just seasonal changes:
Google is having more instability today. #bedlam pic.twitter.com/U1Y05I2K9K
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) December 5, 2019
Quality updates can affect subdomains in individual ways
These tweets from Glenn Gabe and Lily Ray show us how different subdomains on Mercola.com have been affected by quality updates.
It is interesting to see that their health and fitness content has been hit hard, but their pet sections have not.
The pets subdomain has remained stable, while articles has flatlined (which contains most of the controversial content). Interesting to see the foodfacts subdomain recover, although there are many ties to the health benefits of food (and some seem out there...) https://t.co/X9l8oNGkNV
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 5, 2019
In our whitepaper on medical consensus that we shared with our clients with medical sites, one of the things we suggested was, if appropriate, to move any content that could be seen as contradicting traditional consensus to its own subdomain or subfolder. That way, if Google has problems trusting your health content, it is less likely to impact the ability of your other content to rank well.
BERT is now live in many more languages
When Google first announced that they are using BERT to help better understand queries, they told us that this was only released for US English searches. Now, as of December 9, 2019, BERT is being used by Google for many other languages as well.
It's only live in languages beyond English for featured snippets, not for web search results generally.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 9, 2019
This affects approximately 1 in 10 searches. Danny Sullivan told us that it is currently only live in languages beyond English for only featured snippets.
What does this mean? We will note this date on our Google algorithm update post. If you are a non-English site that saw significant changes in traffic around December 9, it is possible that BERT could be connected to these changes.
Keep in mind that BERT is designed to help Google better understand queries. Our current thought is that the types of queries that are affected by BERT are generally long tail searches rather than short, commercial phrases. However, one thing we don’t know is whether Google is using BERT to understand the quality of your content on the page as well. If this is the case, this could affect short tail query rankings as well.
Update: Just before publishing, we got confirmation from John Mueller in a help hangout that BERT actually is used to help Google understand content on a page. Read the next section for more info on this.
MHC Announcements
Newsletter pause for the holidays
As the holidays approach, we are wrapping up our projects for the year. Therefore, this will be our second last newsletter of 2019. You can expect our final one of 2019 next week.
Robots.txt experiment
In case you missed it, we ran an experiment to see if we could get a page that was blocked by robots.txt indexed. We published our steps and the results over on our Wix SEO page. You can read it all here.
Google Announcements
Package tracking early access program
Google has created a new feature that allows shipping companies to show people the tracking status of their packages within the SERPs. This is available to all countries but is still in early access, so shipping companies can now sign-up to participate and give feedback on this feature. Check out the blog post for information on the eligibility requirements, and a link to the sign-up form
Google SERP Changes
Check this out! Google is showing zero cost options in the SERPs
Here is an unfamiliar sighting, Google appears to be shifting focus away from the eComm giants, and making the SERPs a little more inclusive! We agree that this may not have a huge impact on sites such as Amazon, but the idea itself is brilliant!
Ooooh Google, I see you. While this might not put a dent in Amazon, it's genius and actually helpful for people to more easily be shown a zero cost option. pic.twitter.com/8UujzOh8Qa
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) December 7, 2019
SEO Tips
Disavow case study
A Twitter fan named Jesse shared this chart with us. He read our blog post on the November 8 Google update and was inspired to audit his site’s links and file a disavow.
He ended up disavowing about 75-100 low quality blogspot domains that all linked to him from their sidebar as part of a reciprocal linking scheme that was set up by the previous owner of the website.
This site does get a seasonal boost in December, but according to the site owner, this type of sudden increase in rankings and subsequently traffic, is not normal.
The disavow was filed December 2, 2019.
While we can’t say for certain that this increase is due to the disavow, it sure looks like it!
Here is a previous article we have written on how disavowing could help a site even if it does not have a manual action.
This just in: create quality content
No surprises here, Google Webmasters says that Google cares more about the quality of the pages you want to have indexed rather than the type of page you want indexed. No matter the page you put forward for indexing, consider the quality of it first and foremost!
Think less about the type of pages, and more about the quality of the pages that you want to have indexed. Are these the best versions of that content on your site? If so, then indexing sounds good.
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) December 2, 2019
Brodie Clark continuing to test thumbnail images on mobile
This test involved embedding a hidden hyperlink. Brody emphasizes the impact these images can have and how schema doesn’t appear to help.
Another test involved just embedding a hidden hyperlink on a page going straight to an image. Forced a crawl in GSC and was able to have that image updated that day. Those images can have a BIG impact on CTR if used correctly/in the right context.
— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) December 8, 2019
JavaScript rendering -- from Martin Splitt at TechSEO Boost
Notes: Google & JavaScript Rendering by @g33konaut
Googlebot's web rendering service (WRS) is more complicated than people might think. The web is messy and layout thrashing can really negatively impact the time for web rendering. Try to reduce resource requests. #TechSEOBoost pic.twitter.com/OmBgGPuBBB
— Eric Wu ❤️💐 (@eywu) December 5, 2019
Are you asking users to login or create an account to see pricing?
Take it from Ryan who speaks on behalf of most people here, people would rather seek out a more expensive and worse fitting option that to give a site their email address. Ask yourself, is the loss of potential leads worth the emails you receive?
Attention all websites: I'm not going to create an account or login or give you my email to see your pricing. I'll just go with your competitor - even if you're better or cheaper.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) December 3, 2019
Episode 4 of Search for Beginners
This episode introduces learners to how search works. Specifically they cover crawling, indexing and ranking. It’s a nice breakdown if you’re wanting to learn this from Google’s perspective.
📺 Ep. 4: Search for Beginners!
Get the big picture on how Google Search finds your business, organizes it, and presents it to your customers.
Watch here → https://t.co/JpvSMM6iFY pic.twitter.com/PBsvv6AcYX
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) December 4, 2019
Other Interesting News
How do you pronounce JSON?
When we last checked the results were pretty close. Go ahead, have your say!
Do you pronounce JSON:
— Jenny Halasz @🏡for🎄 (@jennyhalasz) December 9, 2019
Global search stats from Google Search
Google revealed this past week some interesting stats related to Google Search. Check it out:
Global search stats from Google searches (shared by Google) at #semrushconf2019:
* 3.5 Billions queries per day
* 15% have never seen before
* >50% conducted on mobile devices pic.twitter.com/aVLVEavsDO— Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) December 5, 2019
Update to Google Assistant based on your diet
There's a new section within your Google Assistant settings, which allows users to limit the type of recipes that your Assistant will recommend to you, based on your dietary restrictions. Currently the restrictions are for gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan and will be taken into account immediately when you look up recipes on your smart display.
If this search feature is widely adopted, it may have a positive or negative impact on rankings for some recipe sites. We’ve noted the date of this change on our Google algorithm update post.
You might have noticed that your YouTube account lost a number of subscribers this week
It might not be your fault -- YouTube is doing a big purge of closed accounts from their metrics. YouTube says that this kind of thing is routine and that’s all part of their ongoing efforts to reduce spam and abuse on the platform. For more info, be sure to read the article over on TechCrunch.
Local SEO - Google SERP Changes
Google changed how the "Ad" label looks on Desktop for the local 3-pack
Some people are saying they're still seeing the green "ad" label, so who knows, maybe this is just a test?
Google is now showing black ad labels on 3-Pack ads on desktop. h/t @glenngabe https://t.co/qU4ElE8Pxz pic.twitter.com/OzlsJ4jZA4
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) December 6, 2019
‘Rated highly for' review tags appear
First spotted about 2 weeks ago, more SEOs are beginning to spot this new addition. It’s believed that this could be from Google’s review mining ability, but even more likely this is probably some kind of combination of Google’s insight coupled with the user-selected tags from when they go ahead and leave a review.
.@mblumenthal have you seen these "rated highly for" review tags before? looks new to me. pic.twitter.com/G4xpFq6kvB
— Sergey Alakov (@sergey_alakov) December 5, 2019
Local SEO - Other Interesting News
GMB creating posts with uploaded images
Interesting case of G using a user’s GMB photos and turning them into a post.
GMB created automatically a Google Post with the photos I uploaded pic.twitter.com/kjMaPgzpA4
— Thibault Adda (@thibaultadda) December 9, 2019
SEO Tools
Internal linking tool to help you find links at scale
This is a really great tool to help you find internal linking opportunities. He lays it out so if you use Power BI, it is nice and easy, otherwise you can use Google Sheets or Excel. Definitely worth checking out!
Fantastic SEO content:
How to Find Internal Linking Opportunities at Scale [using Power BI, Google Sheets, or Excel]
by @ZaineClark via @SeerInteractive https://t.co/DMrFe8FWXH pic.twitter.com/y8N67ATiGs
— Cyrus (@CyrusShepard) December 10, 2019
Visualize your top internal pages with ScreamingFrog
Great tip on how to do more with ScreamingFrog and optimize your links!
Visualize your top internal linked pages with @screamingfrog
in 3 steps :1- Crawl it
2- Visualizations>Force-Directed Crawl Diagram
3- Settings>Scale item>Unique Inlinks
4- Oh..my return policy page is among most linked ones 🤬
5- Optimize it!#SEO #tip pic.twitter.com/JTYgEw7U3T— Aymen Loukil (@LoukilAymen) December 10, 2019
Recommended Reading
Matt Cutts on the US Digital Service and Working at Google for 17 Years – Y Combinator
https://blog.ycombinator.com/matt-cutts-on-the-us-digital-service-and-working-at-google-for-17-years/
Dec 4, 2019
This podcast is one not to miss as it features previous Google employee Matt Cutts in a one-hour segment. He discusses what it was like to be the 71st employee at Google, product development, being one of the first Adwords advertisers, SafeSearch and so much more.
Link Reclamation for SEO: Strategies, Tips, and Best Practices – Stella Murphy
https://www.portent.com/blog/internet-marketing/link-reclamation-for-seo-strategies-tips-and-best-practices.htm
Dec 3, 2019
A solid reclamation strategy is one of the easiest and high ROI link building strategies in SEO. If a site no longer has working links to your site, this is negative for both parties involved and most site owners would be happy to fix the issue. The first step in this process is to find the broken links. There are a number of great tools to help with this including MOZ, Ahrefs and Majestic. Next is to reach out to the site owner, included in this article is a straightforward yet effective email template. This strategy won’t be 100% successful and it may require reaching out several times but having a process for link reclamation in place is an important strategy for any SEO campaign because it can often result in easy wins.
How to Map 404 URLs at Scale with Sentence Embeddings – Hamlet Batista
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/map-404-urls-at-scale-sentence-embeddings/338555/
Dec 6, 2019
It is always recommended that you map 404 URLs with a redirect to a relevant live (canonical) page where possible as opposed to bulk redirecting to the homepage or a singular location — Google has informed us many times that bulk redirecting often results in the redirected pages being treated as soft 404s (as opposed to a clean redirect that passes signals). However, mapping this at a large scale can be difficult if there are a large number of 404 pages. Courtesy of Hamlet Batista, this is a technical but brilliant way of utilizing neural matching and universal sentence encoding to accurately match 404 pages with their live page equivalent where one exists.
How SEO for News can help all websites – Barry Adams
https://www.polemicdigital.com/how-seo-for-news-helps-all-websites/
Dec 4, 2019
Barry Adams works within the niche of SEO services for news publishers. As Barry notes, news sites occupy a very unique vertical on the web, and for SEO you are primarily working with Google News rankings instead of the organic SERPs. Google News has its own set of ranking factors and is a separate algorithm from organic search. This is well worth a read for anyone who publishes news content or is starting out trying to rank a news site.
How to Track Video Views in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps – Andy Crestodina
https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/tracking-video-views-google-analytics-tag-manager/
Dec 4, 2019
This is going to be a great resource for anyone who has videos on their websites (so, most of us). You would think that you can just use Google Analytics to track and report visitor interactions, but did you know there are a whole bunch of different types of “clicks” that are not recorded in Analytics unless you have event tracking setup? So this means you need to be using Google Tag Manager to track these events. Andy created this really great video guide that shows you how to set this up for your YouTube videos.
What is the actual impact of ITP 2.1 and 2.2 on your Google Analytics data? (+ free tool) – Marieke Pots
https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-the-actual-impact-of-itp-2-1-and-2-2-on-your-google-analytics-data-free-tool-99e42c5978a6
Sept 19, 2019
With the release of ITP 2.1 this past March, there’s been plenty of speculation concerning how this will impact your GA data. There’s a very interesting theory broken down in this article which basically outlines that the expiration of your GA cookie after 7 days of inactivity (ie. a non returnee in the first week) will in all likelihood result in returning visitors skewing your data to reflect more sessions by new users, shorter journeys per user, and less channels to attribute their revenue to. To get a glimpse of this theory being tested or for some takeaway lessons for those of you handling GA for important decisions, check out the article for more!
Recommended Reading (Local SEO)
Results of Removing My Google My Business Listing – Bill Hartzer
https://www.billhartzer.com/google/results-removing-google-my-business-listing/
Dec 2, 2019
Bill has a theory that a national or international business does more harm than good for their website if they have a GMB listing. He decides to test this theory not once, but twice and noticed that each time he did so, his organic traffic improved. These tests may reflect an accurate theory, or they may very well be a total fluke. But beware, Bill’s asks that you don’t take his word for it, instead he’s provided plenty of data for you to make that decision for yourself.
The Local Algorithm: Relevance, Proximity, and Prominence – Mary Bowling
https://moz.com/blog/local-algorithm-relevance-proximity-and-prominence
Dec 6, 2019
Local expert Mary Bowling breaks down the three factors that drive the local algo and local rankings in a simple and easy way…
They are as follows:
- Relevance -- the algo asks, “Does this business do or sell or have the attributes that the searcher is looking for?”
- Prominence -- the algo asks, “Which businesses are the most popular and well-regarded in their local market area?”
- Proximity -- the algo asks, “Is the business close enough to the searcher to be considered to be a good answer for this query?” Important note: this is the factor that really defines the local algorithm says Mary.
Jobs
We're looking for a Senior SEO Analyst to join our Digital Team @Zoopla 3+ years of technical SEO experience https://t.co/kITwNfyJVm
— Areej AbuAli (@areej_abuali) December 9, 2019
😎 Weird, wacky JOB ALERT! 😎
Come join the Google Doodles team! Yes, we really do exist…and we're looking for an:
🎨Art Director—Europe focused
⭐UX Designer
👾Creative Technologist/Prototyper
Send awesome portfolios to doodle-jobs@google.com w/job title in the subject line pic.twitter.com/UNY0rwLf53— Jessica Yu (@UjessU) November 4, 2019
Want More?
Paid members also get the following:
- Interesting note for those who were affected by the November 8 update
- BERT is also being used by Google to analyze page content
- The QRG have updated
- Part 2 of Google’s ‘Four Rs of Responsibility’ surrounding YouTube
- The real problem with your 404s
- Disavow case study
- Looking for an option to store old SERPs?
- Google is good at remembering things about URLs
- Pagination and the topic of crawl budget
- If a site has been switched to MFI, why does it still get crawled with Googlebot desktop?
- Invest in what you can control, all else should be secondary
- Deceptive page titles won't hurt you organically per se, but not matching on-page searcher intent will
- Does having more than one h1 on a page confuse Googlebot?
- Bias in search and recommender systems
- A breakdown of Martin Splitt’s talk from TechSEO Boost
- Which SEO myths need to be buried?
- A new resource for tracking browser protection features
- My tl;dr summary of some awesome recent SEO and Local SEO articles
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